(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to knee bolster structures to be attached to vehicles such as automobiles.
(2) Related Art Statement
Investigations have been made to install knee bolster structures (which may be also called “knee protectors”) in interiors of vehicles such as automobiles so as to protect knees of drivers and passengers at front seats upon applications of loads, and their development has been carried out (See JP-A 6-32195 and JP-A 8-282413, for example).
It is the present situation that such knee bolster structures have been developed, designed and attached independently for respective kinds of automobiles, which have required much developing time and costs.
The knee bolster structure needs to be certainly operated or its operation certainty needs to be enhanced to as high a level as possible.
From this point of view, a knee-receiving member of the knee bolster structure projects and protect knees upon application of a load at the time of collision or the like. However, the applicants noticed that impact force which acts upon an operating shaft when the knee-receiving member projects is not small, so that there may be room for improvement to certainly ensure the operation.
Furthermore, it was also noticed that when the knees are protected with the projecting knee-receiving member at the time of application of the load in collision or the like, the knee-receiving member may be pushed back with input force from the knees. The applicants noticed that the effect of accurately protecting the input from the knees upon the knee-receiving member might be reduced.
The knee bolster structure needs to have a knee-receiving member for receiving input from knees of a driver or front-seat or passenger and an impact-absorbing section for absorbing input energy from the knees when they hit the knee-receiving member. Further, consideration has been made to use a knee-receiving member movement section which moves the knee-receiving member to a knee-receiving position for the driver or front-seat passenger so that the knee bolster structure may cope with any person depending upon its physique. However, even if the knee-receiving member movement section is provided, a given impact-absorbing performance cannot be exhibited if the function of moving the knee-receiving member is collapsed with the input load before the impact-absorbing function. Therefore, the function of moving the knee-receiving member needs to be tougher than the impact-absorbing function.